In the mid 1980s, video arcades were licenses to print money for those who acted quickly and stayed popular: pimply teenagers walked in with sacks of quarters and walked out much poorer, yet somehow didn’t complain unless their quarters got eaten. And even then, there wasn’t a thing those poor suckers could do about it. Ha! Suckers!

As large chains like Aladdin’s Castle and Tilt! expanded their token-trade into malls all over the country, mom-and-pop arcades sprang up, especially in the frozen wilds of Canada, to try to cash in on the craze.

Unfortunately, many Moms and Pops were exceptionally stupid and didn’t have the business savvy to stay afloat. Among the forgotten arcades of yore:

Alan Dean’s Castle

Alan Dean was a Pennsylvania lawyer and amateur Ping-Pong champ who got hooked on Space Invaders and decided to open up an arcade. As it was a triangle-shaped wedge in a corner of the mall, it hardly resembled a castle, but gamers flocked to the Heritage Plaza Mall location anyway. Unfortunately, Dean was also a pedophile. This caused major problems for his business plan and after his first arrest, the arcade was quickly shuttered. Nobody was surprised.

Bonk!

Oregon hair salon owner Ashlee Turnbaum and her husband Mike, who worked as an assistant manager a Spencer Gift specializing in neon-lighted products, smelled opportunity when Egg Roll With It! shut down at the edge of the food court of Elm Valley Hills Mall. They leased the spot and turned it into Bonk!, an arcade with lots of Skeeball and Whack-a-Mole games. Unfortunately, most passersby assumed the giant pink neon, “Bonk!” sign outside was a euphemism for sloppy sex with unattractive strangers. After three weeks, Ashlee went clinically insane from answering inappropriate questions and Mike sold the business to cover her medical costs. The newly named, “Boink!” didn’t fare much better and the new owners filed for bankruptcy.

Sneez E. Cheezy

Community theatre director Charles Mound of Del City, Oklahoma, was mesmerized when he visited a Showbiz Pizza for his nephew’s fifth birthday. He invested $75,000 of his own retirement money into purchasing and programming a large cast of animatronic mice for an elaborate video arcade/dinner theatre space where the mechanical actors would perform a three-act play he had written. The play, Death Throes, was about a haunted hospital run by giant rodents. While the arcade shut down after several failed health inspections, Mound made back his investment by selling the rights to the play to Danish director Lars von Trier, who turned it into the miniseries The Kingdom. He took out the rats first, though.

From an idea by RCP.